Baseball is no longer our national pastime

Football trumps baseball in popularity and is “far and away our national game,” says Frank Deford on NPR. “Baseball is still an extremely popular entertainment, but whoever wants to know the taste and passion of America had better learn football,” he says.

Jay Jochnowitz

7 Responses

All true (Frank Deford is the best sports writer writing now). What’s left unsaid: Football, and the Americans watching football, need violence to make them feel alive. Need the shock and awe of football’s four second plays to make them feel energized (and the five minutes of non-action between plays to go get pretzels and beer?). Football is America, encapsulated: boring lives punctuated with violence and shocking indifference to strangers’ damaged health. It’s like a bomb lying in a street waiting to go off. Then it does, injuring countless people. But no one cares; someone places another in the street and we all wait some more.

I tend to think that football, while it may now be the ratings champ, will be short-lived as the nation’s preeminent sport. So much is coming out about the health risks associated with playing the game. Add in the thugs who are playing the game, and baseball will make an eventual comeback.

Pro football, the NFL ,SUCKS. If you can bear to watch a game ,do a little analysis and tell me what is going on. Half the time these so called Pros can’t get the snap count right. How many times do you see one of these fine pros drop a pass that you could have caught. Jim Brown must cringe every time he sees a running back scurry out of bounds to avoid a hit.Then there is the matter of the part time highly over paid officials who couldn’t call a play on their X-Box. If this is the kind of entertainment that excites you and turns you on it is time to look in the mirror. If the NFL went back to the days of “The violent world of Sam HUff” and the “Purple people eaters” Head slaps and no face guards that would be a step in the right direction, but todays game is so micro managed it takes all the “J” out of joy. High paid under performers abound in most sports today and cannot behave when they get off the field so who needs it?Spend your time doing something productive like mowing the lawn or shoveling the walk or you might even take the wife shopping that’s usually more violent than the football game anyway. Well good luck and boy we cannot wait till the next super bowl,YUUUUUUUck

I don’t get the obsession with football. Honestly I don’t. There’s much more action in hockey and basketball. And the game IS absurdly micromanaged, corporatized and peppered with endless time outs and commercial interruptions that it’s unwatchable except for the 2-3 precious minutes of great plays that we are forced to endure 3 hours to experience watching. Tune in to ESPN’s “The Best 2 Minutes in Football” and you’ll see all you need to see about the entire NFL schedule every weekend. Baseball is pastoral, way too dependent on the home run and populated with way too many overpaid, surly brats, but its fatal flaw is that it is a 19th Century and first half of the 20th Century game that requires an attention span that ADHD nation clearly does not possess.